1st Charges Presented Against Baathists

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Iraqi investigative judge Monday presented to a judiciary panel the first charges in the coming trials of senior officials in Saddam Hussein's government.

The charges, for crimes against humanity, were brought against five high-ranking members of the old government in the equivalent of a grand-jury hearing. The men are accused of being responsible for the 1982 massacre and imprisonment of residents of the mostly Shiite village of Dujayl, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

The most prominent man charged was Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan, a half-brother of Saddam Hussein's and a former director of the intelligence service. The referral of the charges, as the procedure is called in the Iraqi Special Tribunal, came a day after senior Iraqi officials said another half-brother of Saddam's, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, a suspected major financier of the insurgency, was arrested in Syria.

The other three men who faced charges Monday were Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former deputy prime minister and a former vice president; Awad Hamad al-Bander Al-Sa'dun, a former chief judge in the Revolutionary Court; and former senior Baathists Abdullah Kadam Roweed al-Musheikhi and his son Mizher Roweed al-Musheikhi.